Friday, September 03, 2010

When it comes to in-depth coverage of Islam, CBN beats all the other networks hands down. This latest report by Dale Hurd about the aggressive territorial behavior of Muslims in Paris is a case in point.

The fact that Muslims are allowed to flout the law with impunity on the streets of Paris demonstrates that the principle of laïcité — the absolute separation of church and state, with no preferential treatment given to any religion — is a hollow promise in today’s France:

See the accompanying article at CBN for more. Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for YouTubing this clip.

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When it comes to in-depth coverage of Islam, CBN beats all the other networks hands down.

Considering the huge disparity in resources between CBN and America's major broadcast networks, this can only stand as a searing indictment of modern television journalism's wholly inadequate coverage of Islamic terrorism and Islam in general.

This gulf is so significant that it can only indicate a tremendous reportorial bias as nothing else can even remotely explain the glaring discrepancy that exists.

If the media's frank hostility and near-terminal case of BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) were not proof enough of this, then one need only consider the fawning and outright enabling role that journalists play in Obama's current administration to understand the enormous level of prejudice that is at work.

I watched the above video last night while researching my GoV News Feed comment regarding their reporter, Erick Stakelbeck. CBN's fact-based, unflinching coverage of Islam and Islamic terrorism is as surprising as it is refreshing to see on a television screen.

Amid all of the deceit and flat-out lies emerging from Islamic media channels, it is remarkable to see a religious network like CBN provide information that is of such value to Christians and non-Christians alike.

It is but one more telling distinction between Christianity and Islam that continues to highlight the profound differences between these two creeds.

The universal worth of CBN's reality-based reporting about Islam is a far cry from the routine manipulations and flagrant distortions provided by Muslim-run networks like al Jazeera or al Manar.

Anyone here at GoV who has not yet watched Erick Stakelbeck's reports on Islamic terrorism is in for a geniune treat.

I'm encouraged that ordinary French people are fighting back with pork and wine parties. They have moral clarity. It's inclusive, because pork and wine, as well as the issue of preserving French culture, are more about being French than any belief system (for instance, Christianity).

The news presenter concludes at the end that the Muslims are taking over because the French have become secular. I don't know whether this is true, but I do know from my experience as a non-religious and socially liberal person, that this idea that Islamization can be prevented or beaten back by returning to Christianity will not play well where I live.

I think if religious people and/or social conservatives want to use their values to fight Islamization, that's fine, but I encourage them to stop blaming secular people, and I hope for a coalition--the same type of pragmatic tolerance I find at GOV.

Those French protesters were probably not all that religious or even socially conservative, on average. I'm guessing this, because they live in Paris. The French people may be like my neighbors in Northern California. I'm a long-term reader and commenter at the leftist sfgate.com. Most articles on immigration, crime and Muslim encroachment have a huge amount of nativist sentiment in the comments--and this from people who identify as otherwise liberal, including people who are pro gay marriage, abortion, and all the other lifestyle issues.

This issue has been on my mind for some time--the difference between the right-wing sites where religion and social conservatism seem to dominate, and OTOH, the ordinary, even liberal people in newspaper comments sections, who effortlessly grasp that one can defend one's native culture without taking a position on religion or social mores.

Now that the Tea Party movement is picking up steam, I hope it goes more in the direction of the newspaper comment sections, than the sectarian and divisive point of view as demonstrated by the news presenter.

At the end, the news presenter observes that the Islamization of France is happening because the French are too secular. I don't know whether that's true, but I do know that this message is divisive and unhelpful. I favor a coalition between religious and non-religious people.

I'm guessing that the French people at the demonstration, were not necessarily religious. They live in Paris, so that would imply that many of them are secular and even socially liberal. They all want their culture to continue, but not all of them want to be active Christians.

Many anti-Islamist websites seem to advocate a return to religion and social conservatism. All I can say is, if they want to win, they'll have to include people like me and my neighbors. For an example of what I mean, read the comments section of the leftist San Francisco Chronicle (sfgate.com) After every article related to crime, immigration or Islam, even though the article itself has an orthodox leftist spin, the majority of the commenters are anti-immigration, anti-crime, anti-welfare, and anti-Islam. And these are people who are otherwise liberal, and advocate gay marriage, abortion and all the rest.

Now that the Tea Party movement is picking up steam, I hope there will be room there for secular, socially liberal people to help with the coalition, and if it is a coalition, the numbers are there for victory. Without people like sfgate.com commenters, not so much.

latté island: At the end, the news presenter observes that the Islamization of France is happening because the French are too secular.

I would attribute that to CBN's understandable pro-Christian bias. You are correct to challenge the accuracy of that observation as France, like much of Europe, has almost fatally committed itself to the Multicultural agenda.

From the bulk of your comments, it would appear as though you are not entirely conservative and, perhaps fiscally conservative but socially liberal. Please correct me if I am wrong. If the foregoing assumption is true, then what you say next is of great importance:

Many anti-Islamist websites seem to advocate a return to religion and social conservatism. All I can say is, if they want to win, they'll have to include people like me and my neighbors.

I agree completely and have already made this point several times in other GoV articles, despite drawing opposition from more hardcore elements of the Christian right.

While Christianity has the promise of delivering a high level of functional opposition to Islam, it will take more than just a pan-Christian movement to defeat the Muslim onslaught.

As I have mentioned before, success will depend on forming a international political base that is sufficiently trans-religious to include agnostics and, even, atheists. Islam has to be opposed on its political basis in shari'a law and not through arguments about its putative merit as a "religion".

It is wisest to leave religious bigotry to those who are most expert at it. Islam has time and again proven itself such a past master of intolerance that few could ever hope to surpass it.

Christianity will show itself to be just that much wiser and truer to the words of Jesus Christ should it find within itself the ability to beckon all who yearn for genuine freedom and liberation from theocracy.

A Christianity that promises only theocracy of its own particular religious stripe is little better than Islam.

Muslims don't understand inclusion, they only understand domination.Their faith is profane.It should be challenged and discredited completely in the West.End Muslim emigration to the West.Expel all Muslims who demand more than inclusion will offer.Most will be forced out within a generation.

I like the idea of the "counter-protests", but protesting on a Saturday doesn't strike me as the best way to make the point.

I'm finding myself getting more and more militant about Islam (and other things). We in the West have reached a point where it's better to pretend there's nothing wrong, or that you don't object to something, than to stand up on your hind legs like a man.

The anti-Islam protesters need to march out onto those streets before the prayer times, sausages and wine in hand, with cameras ready; and force the "private security" thugs to throw them out. Force the elite Bas***** to choose who to support, and then vote accordingly.

gun-totin-wacko: The anti-Islam protesters need to march out onto those streets before the prayer times, sausages and wine in hand, with cameras ready; and force the "private security" thugs to throw them out.

That was my first reaction when I read about the saucisson et pinard gatherings.

Wouldn't it be tragic if people attending such an event accidentally spilled a large portion of their wine right where the Muslims prefer to pray?

Whatever else Beck has right or wrong -- and I confess I have never watched or listened to him much -- it seems to me that he is correctly interpreting the present moment. Which is no small matter. And, as indicated by the "Restoring Honor" held before the Lincoln Memorial last Saturday, he might even be correctly responding to it.

What does he get? Beck gets that there is a deeply and urgently felt conviction emerging organically across a broad swath of the American populace that the spectacular economic and political collapses of recent years were made possible -- even inevitable -- by a much longer Great Moral Decline. Americans' commitment to Judeo-Christian principles, secured for most by a belief in biblical authority, long served to fuel the engine and fortify the rails of our government and economy. Yet now, it is feared, that commitment is no longer powerful and pervasive enough to propel the American marketplace and constrain the excesses and abuses in private and public sectors. In the words of Dr. Alveda King: "Our material gains seem to be going the way of our moral losses."

This is not an exclusively religious concern. Even secular scholars have long recognized that America's Judeo-Christian heritage supplied a set of ideals and principles -- such as the Protestant work-ethic and strong commitments to honesty, integrity, and compassion -- that encouraged and reinforced the habits and qualities that tend to help democracies and free markets flourish. Yet the concern resonates deeply with anxieties long felt by religious conservatives that America has been sliding down a slippery slope to moral relativism -- and that a departure from biblical principles would not come without grave consequences.

Latte Island, I'm pleased to hear about the comments on SF Chronicle articles.

I'm ardently in the Tea Party ranks and yet I am personally incapable of signing on to any Christian faith. That said, I revere our Christian heritage and aspire to right Christian conduct as much as any believer. That we have shot ourselves in the foot with our runaway materialism and embracing of a "we are as Gods" conceit seems self evident. (Think crazed, out-of-control, follows-as-the-night-the-day, economic, social, and political catastrophe of all socialialist experiments in the 20th century.) Moreover, idolatry strikes me as a useful concept in that it focuses attention on what it is that secular society worships. Two things seem idols of the highest rank: the self (as above) and hedonism. Is that the best to which we can aspire?

I think secularists and believers have much common ground in returning the focus to the sublime. Why should they do so? I think the answer is in Joseph Sobran's superb insight that the opposite of faith is not unbelief but crassness. An evening's fare of bodily function humor, undeft sexual humor, profanity, and endless staged scenes of automobiles mysteriously launching high into the air and turning into fireballs will reacquaint any reasonable person with the crassness that is the essence of cable or satellite tv.

If the Tea Partiers do not, in fact, intend to jam religion down the throats of secularists, I think it is alike incumbent on secularists social liberals not to pretend that Roe v. Wade was a principled decision and expect us to embrace it. It was a disgusting lie that manufactured the right to an abortion out of thin air -- all the more disgraceful for the oath that the justices who voted for that result swore to preserve and defend the very Constitution they betrayed.

In a host of other areas too, secularists have availed themselves of the authority conferred by similar Supreme Court decisions that too were nothing less than outright betrayals of the Constitution.

If the SF Chronicle commenters want to cling to the "living Constitution" as a justification of the expediency they find convenient, they have a lot more soul searching to do before the Tea Partiers have to bestir themselves to accommodate them.

If secularists want the religious not to jam religion down their throats, secular and religious conservatives would like social liberals not to jam judicial lies down ours.

Forgive me if I seem to directing any hostility toward you. That was not my intent. I was intrigued by your comment.